us-legislators-social
This project is a small experiment with all the fine data about US Congressional legislators over in the congress-legislators repository. In addition to all the information about House representatives and Senators One of the things that is available in this repository are links to politician's social media accounts. To keep things simple this file only includes information for current officials. So when legislators leave office their entry in this file is removed. The information isn't rolled into the other historical data, which makes looking back at what these accounts were impossible.
But fortunately Git has a record of the old entries. This repository contains an amalgamation of the legislators-current.yaml and legislators-historical.yaml data files that is merged with the legislators-social-media.yaml file. In order reconstruct the historical data the git revision history for legislators-social-media.yaml is wound backwards and parsed.
Here's an example of a reconstituted entry:
- id:
bioguide: B001288
lis: S370
thomas: '02194'
govtrack: 412598
opensecrets: N00035267
votesmart: 76151
wikipedia: Cory Booker
ballotpedia: Cory Booker
fec:
- S4NJ00185
cspan: 84679
maplight: 2051
wikidata: Q1135767
google_entity_id: kg:/m/06p430
icpsr: 41308
name:
first: Cory
middle: Anthony
last: Booker
official_full: Cory A. Booker
bio:
birthday: '1969-04-27'
gender: M
terms:
- type: sen
start: '2013-10-31'
end: '2015-01-03'
state: NJ
class: 2
party: Democrat
state_rank: junior
url: http://www.booker.senate.gov
phone: 202-224-3224
address: 141 Hart Senate Office Building Washington DC 20510
office: 141 Hart Senate Office Building
contact_form: http://www.booker.senate.gov/?p=contact
- type: sen
start: '2015-01-06'
end: '2021-01-03'
state: NJ
class: 2
party: Democrat
state_rank: junior
url: https://www.booker.senate.gov
phone: 202-224-3224
address: 717 Hart Senate Office Building Washington DC 20510
office: 717 Hart Senate Office Building
contact_form: https://www.booker.senate.gov/?p=contact
fax: 202-224-8378
- type: sen
start: '2021-01-03'
end: '2027-01-03'
state: NJ
class: 2
state_rank: junior
party: Democrat
url: https://www.booker.senate.gov
contact_form: https://www.booker.senate.gov/?p=contact
address: 717 Hart Senate Office Building Washington DC 20510
office: 717 Hart Senate Office Building
phone: 202-224-3224
social:
twitter:
senbooker: '2017-09-28'
senbookeroffice: '2017-02-24'
corybooker: '2016-05-09'
senbookerofc: '2013-11-23'
twitter_id:
2167097881: '2015-08-02'
15808765: '2017-02-21'
youtube:
sencorybooker: '2014-02-05'
youtube_id:
uc6flymqns1vettnvza7gopa: '2015-02-17'Install & Run
You can simply use the legislators.yaml file that is included here. But if
you want you can rerun it at any time, which will clone the
congress-legislators repository, wind back the revisions and write out a new
legislators.yaml:
pip3 install -r requirements.txt
python3 history.py
One of the downsides to winding back the revision history is that it also can accidentally bring in bugs that have been fixed. If you notice any please submit an issue ticket. Maybe it makes sense to roll some of this functionality into the original repository...